White House expresses dismay over botched Oklahoma execution

The White House is expressing dismay about the botched execution of a murder convict in Oklahoma Tuesday night in which a supposedly lethal cocktail of drugs initially failed to kill the prisoner.

“We have a fundamental standard in this country that even when the death penalty is justified, it must be carried out humanely. I think everyone would recognize that this case fell short of that standard,” White House press secretary Jay Carney told journalists Wednesday.

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Inmate Clayton Lockett writhed and gasped on the gurney after being declared unconscious before later succumbing to a heart attack following the attempted execution, officials at the state prison in McAlester, Okla. said. They said the situation had developed after one of the intravenous lines delivering execution drugs slipped out of a vein.

Following the trouble with Lockett’s execution, Oklahoma officials postponed another execution scheduled for later Tuesday night.

Asked about the episode, Carney noted President Barack Obama’s support for the death penalty for certain “heinous” crimes and called the offenses Lockett was convicted of “indisputably horrific.” However, the spokesman said the problems with the Oklahoma execution were nevertheless troubling.

Carney referred questions about a possible federal inquiry into the incident to the Justice Department, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

However, there have been no executions in the federal system since 2003. The federal Bureau of Prisons took early steps toward an execution in 2010, but announced the following year that all executions were on hold due to a shortage of sodium thiopental, a drug commonly used in lethal injections.

Authorities have been working on a new protocol for federal executions that does not use sodium thiopental. In a court filing earlier this month, officials said they were in “the final stages of finalizing” the new process. But they have been using similar formulations to describe the status for a couple of years.

With no federally-approved source of sodium thiopental, Oklahoma turned to secretive methods to obtain the drugs for its lethal cocktail. Lawyers for prisoners facing execution have complained that the secrecy violates their rights because they are unable to assess the dangers, side effects and purity of the drugs to be used.